TVA’s decades-long history of nuclear plant planning debacles, horrendous cost overruns and stunning delays in bringing plant construction to completion has accustomed the agency’s ratepayers to mutely accepting just about any new setback related to the nuclear program. Every time a new mind-boggling revelation arises, ratepayers’ armor of imperturbability just seems to get thicker. The latest TVA inspector general’s report on the delays and cost overruns at TVA’s Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor should at last provoke ratepayers’ ire.
The reactor was originally expected to be completed by October of this year at a cost of $2.5 billion. Yet on April 5, barely two months ago, the agency publicly admitted that the work schedule had doubled — to late 2015 — and that the cost had doubled, as well.
Both the announcement, and the lateness of it so close to the anticipated completion date, were shocking. If the schedule had fallen so deeply off the tracks, and if the cost had risen so phenomenally, why was the announcement so late coming? Delays and cost overruns of this scope surely had a genesis that should have been perceived a long time ago. What had the construction managers been doing, or hiding, so long?
TVA’s inspector general’s report doesn’t come close to a definitive answer to those riveting questions. But it provides a synopsis of a record of denial, deceit and inattention by various levels of management that begs the question of whether TVA’s word on any nuclear issue can be trusted going forward.
In a front-page story last Thursday, this paper’s reporter, Pam Sohn, outlined the report made public two days earlier by Inspector General Richard W. Moore. It’s worth a look back to see the high points of the mismanagement of the Unit 2 reactor work, which began with construction timeline problems in January 2008 and snowballed from there.